Agriprocessors’ Sholom Rubashkin: fraud, immigration violations, and so on

Occidental Dissent has a story on Sholom Rubashkin. I don’t know whether I can add anything new to the typical complaints of inhumane and unethical conduct.

It is interesting that Lew Rockwell has published a piece by Prof. William Anderson that praises Rubashkin.

I think Matt Parrott’s analysis deserves to be repeated for emphasis:

Somehow, we share the Alternative Right with a man [Prof. Anderson] who sees enforcement of the most basic immigration laws as institutional racism by America’s anti-Semitic federal government. Somehow, we’re bedfellows with a man who cheers as our traditional families and communities are destroyed by greedy foreigners. Somehow, we’re uncomfortably close to a man who isn’t repulsed by the inhumane practices shown above.

To global Jewry’s credit, the Forward provided a pretty balanced analysis of the episode. You know when the Jewish community condemns a Jewish man, that you have a man who’s beyond redemption. Kudos to them. But the professor tries his damnedest, anyway.

After amusingly suggesting that Forward itself was guilty of persecuting Rubashkin, and laughing off the hundreds of charges of exploiting children, the professor then goes on to lecture us on the curious legal claim that fraud is only truly fraud if you get caught by the victim. To bust somebody for fraud before the victim actually suffers the consequences is immoral, since the perpetrator could have hypothetically squared things up and gotten away with it. I’m no legal scholar, but I’m pretty sure that’s stupid.

I have had grave reservations about libertarian principles for some time, but this kind of ethnically motivated cruelty is the sort of thing that forces one to choose between people like Lew Rockwell and people like Matt Parrott. I don’t think it will be possible to be friends with both sorts.

It is noteworthy, of course, that Rubashkin’s operation produced contaminated kosher meat for Jewish consumption. Thus the Jewish community at Forward had an Ethnic Genetic Interest in seeing Rubashkin punished. By allowing the law to operate in this one, isolated instances, consumers of kosher meat were protecting their own interests.